BIO

Selected for Oprah’s “Power List,” and Dell’s Top 100 Inspire List, scholar, writer, and curator Sarah Lewis is currently finishing her book Rise, under contract with Simon & Schuster (U.S., 2014) with translation rights sold in 5 languages to date. Drawing on her work in the arts, and expanding into sports, business, psychology, sociology, and science, RISE explores iconic ascents and wildly successful human endeavors built on improbable, creative foundations.

Her writing on contemporary art has been published widely in journals such as Callaloo, Artforum and Art in America, and in publications including Rizzoli, the Smithsonian, The Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her Yale dissertation manuscript, Frederick Douglass, The Circassian Beauties, and American Racial Formation, for which she has received support from the Ford Foundation and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition, is under contract with Harvard University Press (fall 2014 release).

She currently serves on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, and is an active curator, having held positions at both the Tate Modern and The Museum of Modern Art. She is also on the curatorial advisory committee at the Barclays Center and at Madison Square Park. She is also on faculty at Yale University, School of Art in the MFA program. She sits on many boards including The Andy Warhol for the Visual Arts, the CUNY Graduate Center, and The Brearley School.

She received her B.A. from Harvard University, an M.Phil from Oxford University, and will receive her PhD from Yale University in 2013. She lives in New York City.